Virtual Weigh Station

The CATT Lab has designed a series of applications for the State Highway Administration, Motor Carrier Division, to help them monitor their virtual weigh station (VWS) sites. Android and iOS apps provide SHA and all law enforcement agencies associated with Commercial Motor Vehicle Enforcement with the ability to manage and enforce commercial vehicle safety requirements in real-time, and a browser-based analytics application allows for better targeting of enforcement activities by managers and decision makers. Additional reports available for highway information systems provide real-time analytics for traffic volumes, speeds, and class related data to understand traffic trends that assist in future highway and congestion planning.

The VWS applications report on a number of violation metrics and alert the user as vehicles passing over the weigh station exhibit these violations:

Over weight (where weights are given by axle)

Speed violations

Length violations

Wrong direction of travel

Unbalanced loads

Axle spacing

Images of each vehicle violating the weigh station requirements are taken and transmitted to the apps, allowing a police officer sitting downstream of an weigh station to recognize and pull over offenders.

The analytics application allows for the representation of archived violations to be displayed using several “classic” data visualization techniques as well as some more novel ideas.

The VWS data and tools are available independently or integrated through the RITIS platform.